What would the world look like if Czar Alexander II lived?

[Antonio the Sixth]

I mean, it could be different in a myriad different ways, as is always the case when important figures die because butterfly effects are powerful.

But if the unspoken premise of this thread is that Alexander II living longer would have prevented the Russian Revolution, I have to disagree. The Tsarist regime was already deeply sick by the time Alexander II came to power, and while he went a significant way toward improving things, even his "sweeping" reforms come off as too little, too late. By the time of his assassination, the reformist era of his reign had already long come to an end, and his policies had reverted to the same kind of stubborn conservatism that was the Romanov trademark (he seemed to have changed his mind again soon before his assassination, but what that would have meant concretely will forever remain speculation). Sooner or later he would have died anyway and passed the buck to his reactionary blowhard son first and then his incompetent reactionary blowhard grandson. Maybe the reforms might have helped stave off revolution for a time, and maybe the revolution would have looked very different than IRL, but some form of radical change was probably coming either way.

There are often similar romantic what-ifs conjured up about the Habsburg empire or the Kaiserreich, and those regimes were at least internally effective enough that they could have survived under better circumstances, but regardless, I find it weird how some people are so attached to the idea that they "could have been fixed" them in the same way fans talk about a toxic lead in a romantic novel. At the end of the day, no, you probably can't fix them, and even if you could I'm not sure it's worth thinking about it too deeply when they're clearly the problem to begin with.